North Africa and the desert

by George Edward Woodberry

II

The dunes lie to the west of Biskra. They are real sand-hills; one can climb on them, there are echoes to be waked, and the plain stretches finely to the mountains behind; but it is the forward view that holds the eye. The altitude is not great, but high enough to give a perch something of the commanding power of a cliff prospect over the sea, and the dunes themselves reminded me vaguely of the Ipswich sand-hills of my own coast and their sterile sea-views. The magical thing in the desert is its unexpectedness; it is not at all like what one would have thought. It is not to me oceanic; but in those first days, owing to the moisture of the air and the wetness, it was more so than at a later time. At some hours and under some lights the desert from the dunes had touches of an April sea, fragments of its color; it was blue—not with the solid blue of ocean, but with ethereal tints, insubstantial veils, like inland August haze, or, to speak exactly, with the moist blueness of March. A brilliant March over stretches of melting snow crust by the sea is the bluest of all months; the sky and the ocean are deeply tinged, and the trickling waters of the snow surface reflect the heaven through pale gradations of the universal hue, which, though nowhere intense, has great luminous volume; it is a blue world. I suppose it was the low moisture rising from the desert that took the reflections in bands and spaces; the scene showed at times vast, distant lakes of pale azure, violet lagoons, strips of fallen sky, indigo outlooks—far away —and all in that almost aerial tone, insubstantial, watery, spring-like, infinitely soft and delicate. From the heights of El Kantara, at the mouth of the pass that looks down on Biskra, such a scene is superb in the morning air, and one might well think he was going down to the roads of an inland sea unlike all others; and from the dunes, in certain weather conditions, though on a far lesser scale, one has this vision of the blue desert.

But it was not the blue desert that made the dunes a leaf in my book of memory; it was a brown little Bedouin boy on a sand-hillock whom I observed on my way home. I made his acquaintance. He was about ten years old; his ragged, earth-colored garment blew round his sturdy bare legs; he was capped with black hair, and his small herd of goats fed beside him. He was shy, and his stolid, great eyes looked up at me—those young Arab eyes, expressionless, but which a touch of joy irradiates, seeming to liquefy their shallow light, making them soft like a caress. He was willing to be acquainted. I fed him with chocolate, and extracted from him the four French words he knew; but, notwithstanding the good offices of Chèrif, whom I had with me, the best educated of the guides, and now the master of the French-Arab school there, our conversation was mostly confined to mutual kind looks. I left him after a while, and a few moments later, as I was walking toward the carriage, he began to sing. I turned. There he stood, erect on the hillock against the desert slope and the low sky, with unloosed voice. The high treble rose with a certain breadth and volume; but its quality was its intensity. I would not have believed the silent little fellow had so much voice in him. “What is it?” I said. “It is for you,” said the polite Chèrif; “it is to thank you.” “What does he sing?” I asked. “Un chant d’amour” replied Chèrif; and I could get no more from him except “blue eyes” and “l’amour.” I looked up at the boy’s earnest face, as he sang bravely on, and listened; and when he had stopped we drove away, and the high treble began again on the hillside.

The Arabs sing much, but this was the first time I heard song in the desert. I always think of the desert silence as embosoming such song, like the hum of insects in the grass; though it may be rare as a bird’s wing, it is there in the great spaces; the desert, to my imagination, is a song-laden air, like Italy; but the Italian is garden song, the desert is wilderness song; the Italian is human, the desert song seems almost a part of nature, a part of the desert. I remember the Bedouin flutes and the low rhythms of the road and the camp; but when I take up a book of Arab song, I see the vision of the Bedouin boy on the hillock among his goats, carolling his chant d’amour.